A Change of Skin Read online

  “Go wash your hands while there’s still water.”

  An old man was eating chongos zamoranos and offered the boy a bite. Javier was sweating but he had been forbidden to take off his brick-colored wool jacket. He sat beside the old man and the old man smiled and offered him a wooden spoonful of that curdled milk and Javier opened his mouth and tasted the sweetness and the grain of the chipped spoon. The old man smiled again. He had no teeth. The honey ran down his wrinkled chin and the front of his white, buttoned-up, tieless shirt. He was wearing a faded felt hat and a black suit with frayed elbows and lapels and he ate the chongos without saying a word.

  “Where is the boy?”

  “In the living room.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “His homework.”

  “Close the door.”

  Yes, close the door. The door of their bedroom or the door of the compartment on the train when the train crossed the river and left behind the homes with lawns that had no walls but instead little signs with the name of the family living there, the stores, the movies, the soda fountains. The people who were different. No, that wasn’t right: the people who were different were those who boarded the train in Nuevo Laredo, after it had crossed the wide shallow brown river between the high earthen banks, the river with its little sand bars and islets and its bushes growing surrounded by water. And then he could understand the language again. The allusions, the jokes, that way of speaking without ever referring to things directly, as if the names of things burned the tongue a little, were prohibited and secret and needed to be approached lightly and laughingly from a distance because the direct word was dangerous. The lightening, softening diminutives. The oblique slang. While his father Raúl sat rubbing his head, his suspenders hanging loose, and one by one held out and examined the purchases he had made on the other side this time: the extension cords, the transformers, the electric irons and coffeepots. And Ofelia his mother stood in front of the compartment looking glass and held her new dress against her body until she saw him, her son, reflected in the glass also standing in the open door with a toy boat in his hand, and with a movement of her head she commanded him and he closed the door.

  He seldom understood what they said at the table. And they spoke very little. Without his knowing why, he came to believe that their faces and their hands, their expressions and their gestures, so familiar, so habitual, had nothing to do with the words they spoke during their meals.

  “Pass the salt, please.”

  And Raúl had the habit of breaking up his bread and dropping it small piece by small piece into his soup.

  “You look tired.”

  While Ofelia always squeezed lemon into her soup. Always, every day.

  “Yes. Well, what do you expect?”

  Javier brushed away the flies from the metal net that protected the bread. Sometimes the bread became old there and began to turn white.

  “Maybe we’ll be able to take a vacation the end of this year.”

  Funniest of all were the dining room pictures. Long and narrow, they told the story of a boy who was teasing a sleeping dog (the first picture); the dog awakens (the second picture), bites the boy in the seat of the pants (the third), and the boy cries and climbs a tree.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It depends.”

  The bead curtain that served as a door rustled as the single servant came from the distant kitchen, where the cooking was still done on charcoal braziers. Thin filets covered with onions.

  “It would be nice to go down to the sea for a few days.”

  “Yes, Ofelia, it would be nice.”

  They stopped talking while the servant served them. They resumed again, with difficulty, after she had left the room.

  “Javier is getting very good grades.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.”

  “Aren’t you, Javier?”

  He nodded without stopping chewing and tried to understand what it was that his mother and father were saying so mechanically and expressionlessly though their lips were smiling. And now and then Ofelia would throw her head back almost happily: a vacation at the end of the year.

  “Don’t start eating before your father. It’s bad manners. They’ll say that we don’t know how to…”

  He opened the curtain in order to climb …

  “Ligeia? Where are you? Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  … to his upper berth and there in the lower, where he had to be, where it was ordained that he be, was the old man of the chongos zamoranos, panting and gray-skinned but with the strength born of pure weariness that belongs to the aged because it has become their habit, on his face the toothless smile Javier did not then understand but which later, if he had tried to write or even to talk about it, he would have described as the transient mask worn when an instant prolongs itself toward fixity; withered, wiry, in his collarless white shirt that hung down to his flaccid buttocks, and beside him the old woman his wife who saw Javier first and pulled long locks of her white hair across her face to conceal it but left her naked heavy breasts exposed, the nipples like brown craters, her wrinkled belly like old linen. She mumbled something and the man turned and observed Javier staring at them. That was how it was. Or no, that was not quite how it was, but really only where and what it was, and Javier never wrote about it because he felt that it had been a meaningless encounter, not one in which anyone had been involved, he told himself this and he put the incident aside, scribbled in one of his notebooks with the comment that sometimes the distance that separates us has not only more value but also more meaning than the closeness that joins us. He was to meet them again, not the same yet the same, years later when he was an adolescent schoolboy and was being punished for some misdemeanor such as forging his father Raúl’s signature and had to stay in the classroom after everyone had left, alone writing on the blackboard I will not forge my father’s signature, I will not forge my father’s signature, I will not forge my father’s signature twenty times until the blackboard was filled and then he erased and began another twenty I will not forge my father’s signature and behind him the room, a makeshift basement classroom in the school of the Marist Fathers, began to change as darkness crept into it, ceased to be the familiar place of slanting light and shadow and familiar smells, ink, paper, crayons, sweat after coming in from exercises in the recreation yard, wood, floor oil, chalk dust, sky dust from the high small open windows and he sat there either not hearing the teacher at all or hearing very indistinctly like the buzz of a distant bee; it ceased to be that room and slowly filled with darkness and coolness that seemed to wipe away the smells of the day while he went on writing I will not forge my father’s signature until he finished, left the last sentence he had written unerased but erased all the others and gathered up his things and took care to turn off the lights and close the door so that it would lock. And tomorrow confession would be given to all students in the first year of law. He had completed his punishment: done it on word of honor, as the teacher had ordered, and in the night the whole school was dark except for those hidden and prohibited patios and rooms of the building next door where the nuns lived, the pale women without makeup who in those years of persecution could not wear their habits, their hair combed starkly back and tied in knots bristling with combs, their spectacles gold-framed, their clothing dark blouses and dark skirts with high-buttoned shoes. He came out to the corner. There they were, crossing the street, an old man in a black suit and a white-haired old woman in a gray and white polka-dot dress, humped, exhausted, patient, hurrying, the same and not the same, he had seen them again.

  And if you had asked him, Dragoness, he could have explained to you that the whole point is not really to get close to someone but to know how to achieve closeness, that the knowledge is more important and enduring than the accomplishment. And when he called

  “Ligeia! Ligeia!”

  you were no longer seated beside him on the bed as he had seen you just before he closed his eyes. He looked toward the bathroom and th
e bathroom light was out. He sighed. He grunted sourly,

  “Ligeia, some day I’m going to send you back to the heathens,” and he took the scissors from the night table beside the bed—Lord, have mercy upon us—and stretched his feet out—Christ, have mercy upon us—and began to cut his toenails very carefully and deliberately—Don’t put your hands in your pockets, Javier. It’s bad manners. They are going to say that we don’t—shaping each nail in the shape of an inverted half-moon, the sides extending out slightly to prevent the nail from growing inward. For once as an adolescent he had had to go to a pedicurist to have an ingrown nail removed. Presently he finished and got up and went into the bathroom and swallowed two Librium capsules. Amen.

  * * *

  Δ I am sure you will forgive me, Pigeons, if I continue to read my tourists’ pamphlets as I whirl along the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla and the four of you turn your backs on the ruins of Xochicalco and make your way down to Franz’s Volkswagen. You are in advance, Elizabeth, walking slowly. Your shawl has slipped from your shoulders and is dragging in the dust but you do not notice until Franz trots and catches up and tells you. For a moment you stop and look down into the barranca, the ravine, where the trees are stunted and the dusty earth is covered with the dry, hard, faintly sour-smelling excrement of goats. A short distance from the path lies the corpse of a dog, and overhead, patiently circling, are the buzzards that were feeding upon it before you came to interrupt them, that will feed upon it again as soon as you leave. You go down to the Volkswagen and get in, Isabel and your husband in back, you beside Franz in front, and the motor starts and the car moves off with a growl of gears and the sound of Franz’s voice saying

  “Erstaunte euch nicht auf attischen Stellen die Versicht menschlicher Geste?”

  And in my turismo limousine I make myself as comfortable as I can and from time to time glance out the window at the fields that in the middle of April are white with hail, rest my cheek against the cold glass, and gradually allow myself to be absorbed reading the folder and remembering that around everything is a high-tension electric fence and a deep ditch of mud and you enter by a stone door over which hangs a single yellow electric bulb. A window on each side of the door. Grass above, as if the fortress were a cellar or a tomb; chimneys rising from the grass as if it were a buried factory. The administrative section. The square buildings with flat roofs. The muddy yards, the violet-colored walls, the barred windows. The disinfecting station. The room where prisoners are received. The guard room. A hall with locked racks for the rifles of the guards. The office of the Commandant. A storeroom for clothing. The triple gallery of the solitary cells with their two iron rings in the wall. The garage. Communal cells with three-decker wooden bunks against the wall, one stove that does not burn, a light that is always turned off, one toilet, one washbasin, the walls always damp. Cell 16, where the elderly and the feeble peel potatoes all day. Cell 13, dormitory for the prisoners who work in the laundry. Cell 14, that of those VIP prisoners who fetch and carry, cook, serve table, cut hair. A door and a corridor and the twenty cells for the condemned: absolutely bare, only the cement floor. Dog kennels. A garbage shed. The infirmary, presided over by a prisoner-physician because the official doctor comes only twice a week in the evening and only to sign death certificates. A bridge and the old stable that is now the hospital. Straw-filled mattresses on the bare floor. The garrison garden where vegetables are grown by bent-backed female prisoners. The morgue, a dark room on a low elevation. Here the dead depart for the incinerator in the city, to return in urns marked F or M. The old mansion with its fences and graveled walks, its porches and attics, its central heating, its rooms filled with lacquered furniture and glass tables and paintings of scenes in the Alps, its large radio and its selection of classical recordings, its dining room with polished chairs, its bedrooms with mahogany beds. Another wall: the women’s section. The same huge cells. The same three-decker wooden bunks. The same barred windows looking out on a muddy yard. The cell where women sit painting wooden buttons, knitting socks for the soldiers of the garrison, sewing dresses for the female guards, shirts for the male prisoners. The garrison canteen. Workshops. The forge. The locksmith. The carpenter: furniture, toys, coffins. The laundry, where only men work but where sometimes on Saturdays selected women prisoners are allowed to come to wash underwear. Then the fourth section, which was built later. Later, Elizabeth, I repeat, later when the prison was overflowing. The prisoners themselves built it. Five enormous communal cells. Solitary cells. A high wall and beyond it lawn, a movie theater, a swimming pool. The tunnel with bins of potatoes, guarded by two Alsatian dogs, the tunnel that leads to the execution yard with its scaffold and bullet-pocked wall. Finally the crematorium. It also was built later. Later, Elizabeth. The crematorium.

  I put aside the folder and put memory aside. Why go on? It sickens me, a memory that is treason to my humanity. My nerves do not want me to remember. They reject it. I remember only as discipline. And that may sicken you: vomit, if you want to, Elizabeth. And here I am, here I am, and tonight I will be there. So what? I am traveling the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla while the four of you are crawling along a winding route, Mexico City–Cuernavaca–Xochicalco–Cuautla–Cholula, that will lead you to a meeting with me and my six young monkish friends. And tonight one of your little group will make his exit, Elizabeth. He will cop out, to be seen no more, and I will be there to attend his departure, to hold the door wide open for him, perhaps to nudge him a little until he walks through it. Tonight one of you will die, Elizabeth. But don’t worry about it. I won’t and God won’t. Let us remember that man seeks above all to give vent to his strength: life itself is will, and the instinct for self-preservation is only one of the indirect albeit more frequent results of this truth. Or, if you don’t like that, reflect that the simplest surrealist action is simply to go out in the street and shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. Nietzsche and Bretón, platoon leaders at Auschwitz? And I? Your caifán and your spinner of words and once your cabby: am I only another rebel without a cause who has begun to grow old, a middle-aging beatnik, an angry young man still angry enough but no longer so young? It makes you think, doesn’t it, Dragoness. You say you don’t like my quotations? Then you quote yours while I quote mine, and we’ll both be happy.

  And some day you will tell me that the flies were coming in the window and buzzing, irritating you, but Franz left the window open while you said to him,

  * * *

  Δ “I walked out leaving him lying there on the bed half asleep, talking to himself, still telling that old story about the party. It’s my period. Do you mind?”

  “On the contrary,” Franz said as you rested your head on his nude chest. “We don’t have to bother with rubbers.”

  “Say something bad about him, Franz.”

  Franz laughed and cupped your chin in his palm. You nestled against his shoulder.

  “No, forgive me. Why bother with him at all? Tell me about you. A love story, Franz. Of real love. God, how he bored me. That same old tale. I’ve heard it a thousand times. Tell me a new story, Franz, a true one. One about youth and young love.”

  You lived on the beach at Falaraki. On the beach itself, in a little house half buried in the sand, there where the shore and the sea form a half-moon of white water the perfect symmetry of which is broken by gentle breezes that undulate the sea all the way to the horizon in perpetually moving silver bands. Say it, go ahead and say it: the foaming Greek sea, the dark empire, as dangerous as it is immense. And Javier said that he could understand it: it was a summons that had to be answered, a road that had to be traveled, an imperative contrast to the hummocks of yellow stone, the low arid mountains that were like the loin of some beast, the hump of a camel driven across the earth and barred from the sea. You rented the cottage. Like all the others it was white, white outside and inside, and sunken into the sand with two narrow windows, completely white under the hot sun but twined about with hyacinth, hibiscus, and
oleander. The first morning you woke there, you held hands

  “… and did what we ought to have done on the beach itself in broad daylight…”

  smelling the thick perfume of the poisonous summer flowers, and behind their smell that of the sea with the dawning sun resting on its stone beds, that of the freshness of the darkness just fading. Javier squeezed your hand and you looked out the window beyond the yellow flowers and saw the earth and the sea, darkness and dawn, coolness and heat, the disappearing orange moon and the glass sun, the unfurled nets, the red fish, the olive trees and the rootless wind, and you felt that you were at the center of everything and that the words you spoke would spread in ever widening circles through all being. Ah, yes. Youth and young love.

  And here, right at the beginning, let’s stop, Elizabeth, and ask if you are sure you can avoid lying. You don’t know whether to be ashamed or to feel pity when Javier tells the story of the girl at the party, a story so complex and devious that it cannot be about love, yet in its own way a story of love too. He didn’t use to be like that. You used to go to bed with such simplicity. There was no other way. Nothing could have been added to that summer on the coast of Rhodes. You had arrived very simply, traveling by steamer on the money Javier had gotten from selling his parents’ home on Calzada del Niño Perdido, not enough for first class, but you didn’t want first class. With a single trunk, and at that, most of its drawers were empty. You arrived simply after the simple events: meeting in New York at City College and falling in love. You said goodbye to Gershon and promised to write … did you keep that promise, Elizabeth?… and you didn’t see Becky at all, for by that time you had stopped going to see her. And so you came to Rhodes on a slow ship, and once you were there, if you needed words, you left them for daylight or the ocean or books. Words were not for night when you lay together very simply in the plain white room with the white beams and the white chimney. And you could think with great clarity then, clearly and subtly because wrapped in each other’s arms in that fishermen’s bed you believed that together you were holding, forming, the parts of a very brief past. Today you find yourselves carrying the empty yet heavy shell of many years together, yet these years seem briefer than that little past you were discovering and creating together then, a past that taught you how simple love can be, yet how difficult. Like certain poems in which the words are not veiled and have meaning in themselves, yet at the same time are bridges to a hidden and deeper meaning, so your nights then were a story that told a second story, silent and concealed, in the background, and everything, your life in the cabin on the beach, like the writing Javier was beginning to do—and his writing was why you had come there—had two realities. There is a moment, and for you and Javier it came then perhaps, in the warm white room scented with hyacinth and ocean salt and old wine soaked into wood, a moment when we can act for ourselves and in concert with others because what we are doing is both meaningless and meaningful, not so much significant in itself as in its revelation to us of the second reality that is sustained and concealed by what we do. Then we go back to fundamentals, and then only can we know that, like art, life is a struggle with what appears to be real, the stubborn world that makes demands upon us and restrains and represses us, a struggle to deform, reform, affirm, and negate reality until it becomes a truer reality, what we want and need. You and Javier came to Rhodes worn out by your struggle with the world, that was all. Perhaps you realized as you lay in his arms caressing his skin that never again would you possess the time and the clarity, the solitude and the closeness, to recover what each of you had lost in childhood in the great obligatory fusion of life lived with your families. And now you were alone together, yet joined. And it was that and not the mere sex, the commonplace of the century, not the physical communion alone, although that was full and complete, it was that which the two of you experienced in the heat and coolness of skin touching skin, hands interlaced, kisses endlessly prolonged and repeated. Alone and together, Elizabeth and Javier, in the night you made love to cease to be what you had been as children in your homes, what you had been hidden in the closet with your brother while your mother Becky looked for you to take you to dinner with the Mendelssohns, what Javier had been reading in the rainy patio under a naked light bulb buzzing with mosquitoes while Ofelia his mother spied upon him from the cracked bedroom door; what you had been mounted on your father’s shoulders to ride along Manhattan’s summer-blue streets to the Hudson; what he had been holding Raúl’s hand and walking a Mexico City that on Sunday was thronged with organ-grinders and bored servant women. To cease to be what you had been, to become what you were. And you would never be sure, although those nights you had lived that certainty, whether like you Javier was denying the appearances of love that make it a semblant echo of the relationships we have with everyone. You told yourself that he was, for he never kissed you in public, never showed you off to others, never moved close to you simply to be close to you, never took advantage of an idle moment to hold you in his arms and make love. Yet neither had he deformed your relationship by insisting, either in words or in his attitude, that it should have more meaning or value than it had sufficiently in itself. That was why your kisses could cover his body with full freedom and you could close yourself off from the persistent sounds of the sea and the night with its crickets and mandolins and give yourself completely, taking completely. The depth of your relationship was between only the two of you and meant nothing that could have meant anything to anyone else, nothing that could explain the world or speak even one word. Nevertheless only there, hidden between Javier’s arms, Javier hidden in the darkness of your open flesh, did the world become orderly and serene. For you were neither of you asking for anything. You were both simply grateful. Grateful for the heavy August heat, almost tangible, for the thick scent of hyacinth, for the heavy bed that would never lose the smell of the lambskins the fishermen who usually occupied the cabin slept beneath, for the tactile closeness of the tile floor that retained the warmth of afternoon, for the weight of your two bodies above all; for without this diffuse denseness of feeling and smell and hearing the other, the cool and sufficient isolation of each in the very union of love, could not have happened. Thus as you came together you remained apart, maintained that essential distance that permits us to see and respect each other, the distance which is maintained by being broken in the fusion of sex, yet is not broken. Like wealth, this had value only if it was spent. The way to preserve it was to use it. And so you needed to remain yourself, he himself, not to plunge into the maze of entire oneness, both then and during the winter when the townspeople brought fish and resinous wine and goat’s cheese and olives and the wind sounded ragged and gray and now and then a mountain of water would fall upon the pebbled beach and you and Javier would hide in the cabin and listen to the wind on the tiles of the roof and with gaiety and excitement pretend a fear that would draw you closer, give yourself to hours of long, unforeseen, always surprising caresses and kisses, each embrace longer, everything unnecessary suspended, everything alien to the hours of your love removed as you lay together in front of the fire on the lambskins on the damp tiles looking up from time to time at the old beams beneath the roof that challenged and withstood the storm. And during the day Javier lost himself in thought, walking the wet beach in his turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, and then sat to write at the pine table that faced the sea, and you went out so as not to distract him. Barefoot, with your trench coat soaked, you would walk beside the sea and discover that in Greece the sea is not another face of the earth because there is no separation here between earth and sea, one does not go into the sea, there is no line of demarcation to pass, no frontier, no rupture. The quiet green sea remembers summer and rejects no one. It seems another, softer, sweeter land across which one can walk while the liquid earth rises and envelops but does not drown. A sea so calm. A sea that is faithful, always present, always real. A sea that wets your face with its spray and makes your tanned skin and your blond hair
lustrous as you walk possessed by the sea and by the man who has brought you here, who has come here to write, to free himself from destructive denials, elegant demands. Who sits at his plain table writing and therefore also struggling with reality in order to deform it, reform it, assert it, make it clear, make it speak. And you ran to him when he finished his morning’s work and appeared in the door of the cabin; ran to him while his forehead was still feverish from concentration, and then behind you, as you lay beneath him on the lambskins joining him in an act that was sufficient in itself, the sea could be heard and could be named with the words that remained always outside and behind, the words that could be spoken only to the extent that your love and pleasure could not be spoken. And the world also had a name and belonged to both of you because you possessed it by remaining alien to it, dominating it with solitude in which you could see only each other, together and apart in a dark arc that pulsated from the sexual hair to the seeking lips. You by your life gave life to the earth, and away from you the men who spoke the names of things could utter the names of the sea, the words by which they have created and discovered the sea and the islands, the words that belong to all languages of all centuries: